Science Talks the Hobbit

In this week’s edition of Science Talk, the podcast of Scientific American, there’s a segment entitled Little Brains, Big Brains, about the Indonesian hobbit or homo floresiensis.

Little Brains, Big Brains: Latest Flores Hobbit News
Scientific American, May 21 2008

You can download the podcast or listen to it straight from the site. Kate Wong, the resident anthropology expert talks about a recent American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting where the sessions involving the Hobbit was a pretty hot topic. She gives an overview of what is known about the find, but I think there wasn’t enough attention paid to the skeptics and criticisms to the hobbit thesis – in part, this may be since plenty of criticism has come from the Indonesian (read: non-western) scientists themselves.